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nections between mental problems and physical characteristics of the brain,
often based on postmortem dissections. Such writings include his very first
publication, “The Physiological Basis of the Neuroses,” and a three-part series,
“The Brain of the Mental Defective,” as well as his 1935 Cambridge MA thesis,
“The Thickness of the Cerebral Cortex and Its Layers in the Mental Defective”
(Ashby 1933, 1935; Ashby and Stewart 1934-35).
Such research was by no means untypical of this period, but it appears
to have led nowhere. No systematic physiological differences betwen normal
and pathological brains were convincingly identified, and Ashby did not pub-
lish in this area after 1937.
6
After his move to St. Andrew's Hospital in 1936,
Ashby's research into insanity moved in several directions.
7
The January 1937
annual report from the hospital mentions a survey of “the incidence of vari-
ous mental and neurological abnormalities in the general population, so that
this incidence could be compared with the incidence in the relatives of those
suffering from mental or neurological disorders. . . . Dr. Ashby's work strongly
suggests that heredity cannot be so important a factor as has sometimes been
maintained” (Ashby 1937a). The report also mentions that Ashby and R. M.
Stewart had studied the brain of one of Stewart's patients who had suffered
from a rare form of brain disease (Ashby, Stewart, and Watkin 1937), and that
Ashby had begun looking into tissue culture methods for the investigation
of brain chemistry (Ashby 1937b). Ashby's pathological work continued to
feature in the January 1938 report, as well as the fact that “Dr. Ashby has also
commenced a study on the theory of organisation as applied to the nervous
system. It appears to be likely to yield interesting information about the fun-
damental processes of the brain, and to give more information about the ways
in which these processes may become deranged”—this was the beginning of
Ashby's cybernetics, the topic of the next section.
According to the St. Andrew's report from January 1941, “Various lines of
research have been undertaken in connection with Hypoglycaemic Therapy.
Drs. Ashby and Gibson have studied the effects of Insulin as a conditioned
stimulus. Their results have been completed and form the basis of a paper
awaiting publication. They are actively engaged also in studying various met-
abolic responses before and after treatment by Insulin and Cardiazol. The
complications arising from treatment by these methods are being fully inves-
tigated and their subsequent effects, if any, carefully observed. It is hoped to
publish our observations at an early date.” Here we are back in the realm of the
great and desperate psychiatric cures discussed in the previous chapter. Insu-
lin and cardiazol were used to induce supposedly therapeutic convulsions in
